From the Preface by Charles R. Johnson
Can a black writer be too profound, too visionary, and too expansive for a general American readership?
I would wager that this question about authors and audiences nagged poet-philosopher Jean Toomer his entire life. In American literary history he is unique. A metaphysical seeker and searcher. A pioneering genius, which is a polite way of saying that among black writers (and most white ones) in the first half of the twentieth century he is a glorious oddity. To put it bluntly, colored men were not supposed to think about the perennial epistemological and ontological questions-Western and Eastern-that absorbed Toomer, or to think about them so damned well. Not then nor today are these widely considered proper subjects for black men. Personally, I cannot believe at the time Toomer wrote his finest work that neither whites-conservative, liberal, or radical-nor most Negroes were prepared for a black poet of Being who believed that "the true critic is a critic of meaning and of values."